Weekly Message November 28, 2005 Evangelism as the Invitation to Be Different When I was in seminary, I got the impression that my job as a pastor was to help lessen the gap between the Bible and the "modern world." Here was the Bible, mired in the First Century. Here was the skeptical, critical modern world. The pastor, through preaching and various acts of pastoral ministry, labored to lessen the gap, to bring the gospel close to where modern Americans lived. Since then I have come to the conclusion that today's faithful pastor ought to clarify, accentuate the gap between the Bible and the modern world rather than lessen the gap. Evangelism calls people, not to agreement, but to conversion, detoxification, the adoption of practices meant to save them from the deceits of the "modern world." In churches which have for so long called people to adjustment, we are calling for pastors willing to call people to alienation, to be, in the tit le of a book by Hauerwas and me, "Resident Aliens."[1] I consider it a happy gift of God that here, at the end of the Twentieth Century, increasing numbers of Christians in North America sense that something is wrong, feel lost, cast adrift, afloat on a sea of uncertainty, homeless. Undoubtedly, the I Peter designation of early Christians as "aliens" and sojourners arose in a situation in which baptism pushed one to the periphery of the dominate order, not so much on the basis of baptism's demands, but rather because the dominate order is intolerant of anyone who fails to bow before the altar inscribed with the claim that all intolerance must be rejected except for the intolerance which says that we must be equally tolerant of all claims. A few years ago, when I was in Australia, where somewhere less that twenty percent of the population is identified as Christian, [note from Rowland: this is the figure of regular church-attenders; the 'Christian' tag applies to up to 70%] there was a news story about a pentecostal church in Sydney which had been vandalized for the second time in a month. Earlier, someone had started a fire at the church. Now, someone had shoved a fire hose in the window of the church, ruining the contents of the building. The church was located in a small business center so, when the vandals flooded the church, they also flooded the surrounding businesses. The owner of a florist shop next door to the church complained, "No one told me, when I rented this shop, that I would be next door to a church. I'm really quite upset with having to have a business next to a church." The reporter asked a police spokesperson, "Do you think this is anti-religious violence here?" "Anti-religious? No. This was a church," said the policeman. What impressed us was not only that, if these acts had been perpetrated against a mosque, a synagogue, everyone would have called it racist, or anti-religious, for these groups are clearly at odds with the dominate order and are periodically attacked for that reason. There is as yet a failure to recognize that churches are increasingly finding themselves in exactly the same situation as our neighborhood mosque. We live in wonderful times. The Christian faith has always done quite well during times of cultural chaos and the complete disintegration of society otherwise known as downtown Birmingham. Baptism encourages us to embrace a new culture and community (church) which helps us to enjoy being weird. Christians are not first called to be aliens. Jesus calls us to be witnesses "in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8) -- although it is interesting that the Greek word for "witness" is the same root as our word martyr. Jesus has not called us to hunker down behind the barricades but rather to "Go...and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them....teaching them...." (Matt. 28:19). Yet it is important for the church as witness to have something to say which is more interesting than what the world says. Give the world credit, one reason why the world mostly ignores us is that we have so little to say which the world cannot hear as well elsewhere. When church becomes Rotary, church will lose because Rotary serves lunch and meets at a convenient hour of the week! The church exists, not for itself, but rather to save the world, to "proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (I Peter 2:9). So the question is not if we shall live as Christians in this world, for that is no option for us. Rather, the question is, now that God has entered this world as Jesus the Christ, how then shall we live? One of my students came under the influence of a sect which was rumored to be working on campus. His parents called me, frantic to rescue him from the dominance of this demanding, separatist group. The group was completely monopolizing the young man's life. When I finally met with him, they talked about his experience with the group. When I asked, he told me that he had grown up in a Lutheran church in the midwest, that his parents had been active in the church all their lives. "Then why on earth, I must ask, could you become involved in this strange, fringe group?" I asked. "Well, it all started on the first Sunday I visited them. When I walked into their church, I saw black people, white people, people of every shade of the rainbow. You could feel the love. Our church had always preached this sort of loving fellowship to me. But I had never seen it until I walked into that group. I said to myself, 'This is the church I've always heard about but have never seen until now.'" I waited some time before I asked him other questions. William H. Willimon -------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] "Aliens" (Gk: paroikos and parpidamos) is the chief metaphor employed by I Peter to describe a Christian's relationship to the surrounding social order. Abraham left his country and kindred (Gen. 12:1). His heirs became "aliens in the land of Egypt" (Lev. 19:34). The Fourth Gospel says that Jesus, "came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him" (John 1:11). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bishop Willimon invites you to visit the Bishop's Message Discussion Board to continue the conversation whenever something that appears in these messages grabs your attention and calls for response. (C) 2005 North Alabama Conference
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